Monday, January 26, 2004

Me and Tom DeLay

In
my last article, I tried to use an HTML table to format the article,
picture, and caption the way I wanted. I couldn't get it to turn out
properly, so I posted it knowing you would have to use the horizontal
scroll bar to read it all. Tacky, I know, but it wasn't worth
staying up late over it. If anyone knows a good, free, WYSIWYG HTML
editor, please mention it in a comment. I use OpenOffice to draft
the articles, because it has a spell checker (and is free); I use
Netscape Composer for layout, because it is easy to insert pictures
(and is free), then I cut and past the source into Blogger. It's
cumbersome, but, hey, it's all free.

I
have decide again to forgo all the heavy stuff; it's time for some
light reading (for you) and light writing (for me). I was reminded
the other day of an incident between me and Tom DeLay's office. I
had gotten into the habit of saying (silently, if alone) 'he's a
crook' whenever I hear Tom DeLay's name. That happened the other
day, and I stopped to ask myself how I got into that habit; or, why
do I think he's a crook?

In
the interest of being fair and balanced (and avoiding a libel suit),
I must say that I have no evidence that he is a crook, really. Crook
is perhaps too strong of a word. Tacky is too mild, though. It's
not just that he can't format an HTML page. It's not just that he
has more home pages (1234) than
Imelda
Marcos has shoes. No,
what bugs me about him is that he isn't exactly forthright in the way
he collects campaign contributions. At least he wasn't, in 2001 and
2002. He didn't try me in 2003, nor yet in 2004.

In
2001, I think in the springtime, I got a message that I should call
Washington DC because I had been nominated for a leadership award. I've
never been a big fan of hanging pieces of paper on my wall; I
already have lots of paper. So I didn't call back. The following
year, I got the exact same message again. This time, I wasn't busy,
and I was curious. After all, I generally am not recognized for my
leadership qualities. Although I am a leader of sorts, I do it by
trying to set a good example, quietly, and let others follow along if
they choose. It's quite effective in my everyday life, but it
doesn't attract attention. So, I was suspicious, vaguely; not of
anything in particular, it 's just that it seemed weird.

So
I call the number, and I do not get a person. I get a long tape
recorded message (with bad sound quality) that goes on and on and on
about this struggle and that struggle and how we need to change
things. I don't remember the specifics, but it had something to do
with getting government off the backs of businesses or something like
that. Although the sound quality was bad, I did manage to discern
the phrase “majority whip” somewhere amidst the
bleatings. Remember, the message did not say who had called, just
that I had been nominated for this award. So, I entered the phrase
“majority whip” into Google. We had just
gotten a fast network connection at the office, so I
quickly got to one of Mr. DeLay's home pages. I was greeted by a page
in which the proud face of Tom DeLay took up most of the screen, with
an American flag in the background. At least that is the way my
hippocampus remembers it. The Wayback Machine shows a
much less
garish, though hardly understated, design. Anyway, at least I knew
who was behind all of this.

After
a few minutes, a real human comes on the line. He congratulated me
heartily for being such an important pillar of the community. He
stated that I had won this award, and I could display it proudly on my
office wall next to my other awards. He did not know that all of my
awards
were sitting in the back of my dressing room closet. [Since then, my
wife got
them framed -- just before my last birthday; she needed the
closet space
for shoes, so now they (the awards, not the shoes) actually are on
the wall of my office.]

Some guy, whose name I don't remember, let's
call him Mr. Enthusiasm, went on to say that I
also had the opportunity to get my name on a full-page ad that they
were planning to run in the Wall Street Journal. All it would
take
would be a $300 campaign contribution. I didn't say anything. To
fill the awkward silence, Mr. Enthusiasm piped up, “of course the money
has
nothing to do with the award.” They “needed” my
support for this and that. I would be an honorary co-chair of the
Business Advisory Council. Odd, since my only business experience
is
that I had a paper route when I was in elementary school.

By
then, I had gone to a few of the other Google hits, so I had an idea
of the political position of Mr. DeLay. I told Mr. Enthusiasm that I
did not agree with Mr. DeLay on anything. I offered to pay $300 to
NOT have my name on the same page as Mr. DeLay's, especially if they
promised to never call me again. Funny thing, I haven't heard from
them since.

After
I recalled this, I remembered also that there is an investigation
regarding his fundraising practices, or at least an investigation
that relates peripherally to him. It's hard to tell from the
article:

AUSTIN,
Texas — Authorities are conducting a criminal investigation
into whether corporate money, including hundreds of thousands of
dollars linked to U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, improperly
financed the Republican Party's takeover of the Texas Capitol...

DeLay,
whose office did not respond to requests for interviews, long has
been viewed as one of the most innovative and prodigious fundraisers
in politics. He has not been accused personally of any campaign
finance violations.

I
decided to run a search to see if others have blogged about this. In
fact, there are many references. Try “Tom DeLay Wall Street
Journal leadership award” in your favorite search engine. One
of my favorites is here
(courtesy of Aggressive Voice.) Another,
(Computer Bob). Rob Kall, another blogger, did some nice research
into this and has some pertinent links to news articles,
etc. In my own research, I found an article
showing me what illustrious company I had been nominated to join:

So just who gets to be a member of the
Council?

Take the case of Mark A. Gethren.

In early February, the NRCC rescinded
Gethren's invitation to its March luncheon and revoked his honors as
Virginia Republican of the Year when they learned that Gethren had been
sentenced to 26 years in prison. He had been convicted of six sex
crimes the previous year...

Chris Hill, a Sarasota, Fla., businessman
and honorary member of the Business Advisory Council, was a candidate
for the NRCC's 2001 Businessman of the Year. But then he was charged by
federal prosecutors in Iowa with distributing drug paraphernalia and,
if convicted, faces up to 20 years in prison.

The link below goes to a dummy account that automatically forwards email to the Federal Trade Commission's spam reporting service. Don't use it unless
you are a robot. Instead, act like a human and figure out the real address from this: joseph/dot/j7uy5/at-sign/gmail/dot/com

The Corpus Callosum is an occasional journal of armchair musings, by an Ann Arbor reality-based, slightly-left-of-center regular guy who reserves the right to be highly irregular at times.
Topics: social commentary, neuroscience, politics, science news.
Mission: to develop connections between hard science and social science, using linear thinking and intuition; and to explore the relative merits of spontaneity vs. strategy.